Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (51 page)
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Authors: Matthew Carr
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BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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As Medina Sidonia and others had feared, the corsairs included large numbers of Moriscos. In 1617, the distinguished English courtier Lord George Carew informed his friend Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador at the Mughal court, of a wave of “Turkish” piracy all over the Mediterranean, especially in Spain itself, where “they spoyle the maritime villages and take many prisoners, which is principallye affected by the banished Moores that once inhabited the eastern coast of Spayne.”
13
Carew noted that “these piratts now are become good mariners” and worried that they “will visite ere itt be long christian coasts upon the ocean.” The increase in piracy cannot solely be attributed to the expulsion, but there is no doubt that expelled Moriscos took to corsairing, either to make a living or take revenge on their former tormentors. In June 1618, a fleet of 6,500 corsairs from Algiers that included 250 Moriscos, launched a huge slave-hunting raid on Lanzarote. The best-known Morisco corsairs came from the militant Morisco community of Hornachos, which established itself in the run-down Moroccan port of Salé (Rabat) on the estuary of the River Bouregred. Together with an assortment of Christian
renegados
from various countries, the Hornacheros converted the port into an autonomous corsair republic, with a fleet of forty ships, its own grand admiral, and a ruling council, or
divan
, that coordinated their operations and shared out their spoils.
13
Carew noted that “these piratts now are become good mariners” and worried that they “will visite ere itt be long christian coasts upon the ocean.” The increase in piracy cannot solely be attributed to the expulsion, but there is no doubt that expelled Moriscos took to corsairing, either to make a living or take revenge on their former tormentors. In June 1618, a fleet of 6,500 corsairs from Algiers that included 250 Moriscos, launched a huge slave-hunting raid on Lanzarote. The best-known Morisco corsairs came from the militant Morisco community of Hornachos, which established itself in the run-down Moroccan port of Salé (Rabat) on the estuary of the River Bouregred. Together with an assortment of Christian
renegados
from various countries, the Hornacheros converted the port into an autonomous corsair republic, with a fleet of forty ships, its own grand admiral, and a ruling council, or
divan
, that coordinated their operations and shared out their spoils.
For more than half a century the “Salee Rovers,” as they were known in England, continued to operate in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and their ships were found as far afield as the English Channel, Iceland, and Newfoundland. Their notoriety was even enshrined in
Robinson Crusoe
, when Defoe’s protagonist is captured by a “Turkish rover of Sallee” during a trading expedition to Africa and subsequently enslaved, before his escape with the help of a local “Maresco” paves the way for his subsequent adventures.
Robinson Crusoe
, when Defoe’s protagonist is captured by a “Turkish rover of Sallee” during a trading expedition to Africa and subsequently enslaved, before his escape with the help of a local “Maresco” paves the way for his subsequent adventures.
All these factors cast a shadow over the king’s achievement that could not be entirely dispelled by propaganda. Lerma’s own position was not greatly enhanced by his role in the expulsion. In March 1618, he was made a cardinal by Pope Paul V, in what his enemies believed was a maneuver to escape execution for his corrupt financial practices. In October of that year, these allegations of corruption finally obliged Philip to banish his mentor from court, in a palace coup that was engineered by Lerma’s own son. The duke left Philip’s office in tears and retired to his estates, where he remained a pariah from the circles of power until his death in 1625.
Philip himself did not long outlive the political fall of his favorite. In February 1621, the Little Saint became ill with scarlet fever. His frail health had been undermined by years of gluttony, and despite three bleedings by his doctors and the restorative presence of the remains of Saint Isidore in his chamber, he never recovered. Facing death, Philip was stricken by remorse at his failings as a ruler and terrified at the prospect of a long period in purgatory. There was certainly much to regret. Having secured a much-needed period of peace for his war-weary subjects, he and Lerma had failed to take advantage of it. For years, his more astute advisers had urged the monarchy to take action on the social and economic problems facing the country, from Spain’s chaotic finances and oppressive taxation to a skewed social hierarchy that was top-heavy with aristocrats, bureaucrats, and clergymen but lacked farmers to work the land. In 1619 the Council of Castile published a report originally commissioned by Lerma himself, which identified the depopulation of the countryside as one of the most serious problems facing the country and recommended the planned resettlement of skilled cultivators in Spain’s deserted regions.
This was precisely the activity at which the Moriscos had excelled, but they were now gone, sacrificial victims in a vainglorious fantasy of religious purification that the king and his favorite believed would restore Spain’s greatness and bring honor and prestige to the monarchy. On March 31, 1621, Philip died, just short of his forty-fourth birthday, and the throne was inherited by his son Philip IV (1621–1665). And within a few years, the giddy expectations of national regeneration that had once surrounded the expulsion would be swiftly forgotten, as Spain continued to experience an inexorable decline that was in many ways as spectacular as its rise to power.
Even before Philip’s death, the fragile peace that had made the expulsion possible had begun to unravel. In 1618 an anti-Catholic rebellion in Bohemia triggered the Thirty Years War and sucked Spain into another maelstrom of savage religious conflict. In 1621, in one of his last acts as king, Philip refused to renew the truce with the Dutch United Provinces and ushered in a new phase in the longest of all Spain’s wars. By 1625 Spanish armies were once again engaged in multiple conflicts, with a staggering three hundred thousand soldiers deployed abroad and another half million men mobilized in the militia. Despite the prodigious efforts of Philip IV’s able chief minister and Lerma’s successor as
válido
, the Count of Olivares, Spain was barely able to find the money and manpower to sustain this vast military enterprise.
válido
, the Count of Olivares, Spain was barely able to find the money and manpower to sustain this vast military enterprise.
War fanned the smoldering fires of sedition throughout the Spanish Hapsburg domains. Between 1640 and 1652, the secessionist revolt in Catalonia known as the Reapers’ War brought French troops into the principality on the side of the rebels and eventually forced Spain to cede a large swathe of territory to its archenemy. Further rebellions in Valencia, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily continued to erode the crumbling edifice of the Spanish Hapsburg empire in Europe and shifted the balance of power inexorably toward France. In 1643 seven thousand of Spain’s finest soldiers were annihilated by a French army at the battle of Rocroi, the most shattering military defeat in Spanish history. Four years later, the Peace of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to an end, and Spanish weakness was confirmed by the recognition of the sovereignty of the Dutch United Provinces at the Treaty of Munster—a landmark moment that ended nearly eighty years of war and marked the symbolic end of Spain’s “golden century.”
By the end of the seventeenth century, Spain was teetering on the brink of administrative and financial collapse, and the monarchy was barely able to impose its authority over its own subjects or resist the encroachments of its external enemies. “It would be difficult to describe to its full extent the disorder in the government of Spain,” declared the French envoy, the Marquis de Villars, in 1668, observing that “the power and the policy of the Spaniards’ had been “diminished constantly . . . since the beginning of the century.”
14
In 1700 the death of the half-mad and childless King Charles II was followed by the War of the Spanish Succession and the eventual accession of a Bourbon king to the Spanish throne.
14
In 1700 the death of the half-mad and childless King Charles II was followed by the War of the Spanish Succession and the eventual accession of a Bourbon king to the Spanish throne.
Long before the final collapse of the Spanish Hapsburgs, many Spaniards had begun to identify the expulsion as a major contributing factor in Spain’s dizzying decline. “It is a most malign policy of state for princes to withdraw their trust from their subjects,” wrote the chaplain and royal secretary Pedro Fernández de Navarrete in 1626, in a gloomy analysis of Spain’s economic problems entitled
Conservación de monarquias
(Conservation of Monarchies), which blamed the depopulation of Castile on the “many and numerous expulsions of Moors and Jews, enemies of our Holy Catholic faith.” Though Navarrete condemned both expulsions as a “mistaken policy decision,” his attitude toward the Moriscos was clearly ambivalent. On the one hand, he described the expulsion as “so well executed by our holy king Philip III,” yet he also implied that it had been unnecessary, writing,
Conservación de monarquias
(Conservation of Monarchies), which blamed the depopulation of Castile on the “many and numerous expulsions of Moors and Jews, enemies of our Holy Catholic faith.” Though Navarrete condemned both expulsions as a “mistaken policy decision,” his attitude toward the Moriscos was clearly ambivalent. On the one hand, he described the expulsion as “so well executed by our holy king Philip III,” yet he also implied that it had been unnecessary, writing,
I shall state only that despite the great importance of a large population to our kingdoms, the Spanish monarchs have always preferred that the mystical body of the monarchy reduce its illustrious numbers than consent to harmful humours that may contaminate good blood . . . for those with different customs and religion are not neighbours, but domestic enemies.... Despite all this, I am persuaded that if we had found a means of granting [the Moriscos] some honour, without marking them with infamy, before their desperation led them to such evil thoughts, they might have entered through honour’s door into the temple of virtue, and into the confederation and allegiance of the Catholic Church, without our bad opinion of them having incited them to evil.
15
Other leading members of the court and government were also beginning to reassess the expulsion as the crisis of manpower in the countryside became more apparent. On September 28, 1622, little more than a year after his father’s death, Philip IV officially recognized the “great harm caused by the expulsion” in Valencia in the form of falling rents and depopulation. In 1633 Philip rejected a proposal from the Council of Castile to expel the Gypsies, on the grounds that this option had already been considered and rejected because of the “depopulation of these kingdoms after the Moriscos left.” So acute was the depopulation crisis perceived to be that Philip’s confessor even suggested inviting the Moriscos back into the country, and Olivares also made the same suggestion regarding the Jews. As late as 1690, the Moroccan ambassador in Madrid claimed to have overheard court officials criticizing the expulsion and Lerma’s role in it. These changing attitudes were reflected in the more sympathetic and even nostalgic cultural depictions of the Moriscos that emerged after the expulsion, from the second part of
Don Quixote
to Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s powerful play
Amar despues de la Muerte
(To Love After Death). Based on an episode from Ginés Pérez de Hita’s chronicle of the War of the Alpujarras, Calderón’s tragic tale of love and revenge describes how the Morisco nobleman el Tuzaní infiltrates the Christian camp after the sack of Galera to avenge the death of his lady Maleca at the hands of a Spanish soldier who has killed her to steal her necklace. Featuring real historical figures such as Aben Humeya and Don John of Austria, Calderón depicted the Morisco rebellion as a collective revolt against Christian oppression, and contrasted the nobility of his Morisco protagonists with the squalid looting of the Spanish soldiery.
Don Quixote
to Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s powerful play
Amar despues de la Muerte
(To Love After Death). Based on an episode from Ginés Pérez de Hita’s chronicle of the War of the Alpujarras, Calderón’s tragic tale of love and revenge describes how the Morisco nobleman el Tuzaní infiltrates the Christian camp after the sack of Galera to avenge the death of his lady Maleca at the hands of a Spanish soldier who has killed her to steal her necklace. Featuring real historical figures such as Aben Humeya and Don John of Austria, Calderón depicted the Morisco rebellion as a collective revolt against Christian oppression, and contrasted the nobility of his Morisco protagonists with the squalid looting of the Spanish soldiery.
The reassessments of the expulsion coincided with a partial official rejection of Spain’s
limpieza
laws, which Olivares condemned as “contrary to divine law, natural law, and the law of nations.” Such criticisms were generally focused more on the frauds and evasions caused by these statutes and their negative impact on the nobility than on the principles that supported them. Though Philip IV banned the infamous “Green Books” that were so resented by the aristocracy, the association between pure blood and pure faith continued to constitute a hallmark of Spanish identity—to Spaniards and foreigners alike—for many centuries to come. In his satirical poem
Don Juan
, written in the early nineteenth century, Lord Byron mockingly described his hero’s father as “A true Hidalgo, free from every stain / Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source / Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain.” Even in the mid nineteenth century, the English traveler Richard Ford found Spaniards who could still boast that they were
el cristiano rancio y sin mancha
—the genuine untainted Christian. It was not until 1834 that the Inquisition was finally abolished. The distinction between Old and New Christians was not formally disavowed until 1860, when the Spanish parliament ruled that entrants to the Army Cadet Corps were no longer required to produce certificates that testified them to be free “from any admixture of Jew or Moor.”
limpieza
laws, which Olivares condemned as “contrary to divine law, natural law, and the law of nations.” Such criticisms were generally focused more on the frauds and evasions caused by these statutes and their negative impact on the nobility than on the principles that supported them. Though Philip IV banned the infamous “Green Books” that were so resented by the aristocracy, the association between pure blood and pure faith continued to constitute a hallmark of Spanish identity—to Spaniards and foreigners alike—for many centuries to come. In his satirical poem
Don Juan
, written in the early nineteenth century, Lord Byron mockingly described his hero’s father as “A true Hidalgo, free from every stain / Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source / Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain.” Even in the mid nineteenth century, the English traveler Richard Ford found Spaniards who could still boast that they were
el cristiano rancio y sin mancha
—the genuine untainted Christian. It was not until 1834 that the Inquisition was finally abolished. The distinction between Old and New Christians was not formally disavowed until 1860, when the Spanish parliament ruled that entrants to the Army Cadet Corps were no longer required to produce certificates that testified them to be free “from any admixture of Jew or Moor.”
Regret at the negative economic consequences of Spain’s great purges did not mean that its rulers were prepared to reverse them, nor did these reassessments translate into greater tolerance toward those who remained in the country. In 1615 the English ambassador, John Digby, described a large auto-da-fé witnessed by Philip III at Toledo, in which a Morisco condemned to death “continued in his obstinacie in the Moorish Religion, against whom the people showed so strange a violence that, as he was leading [being led] to Execution . . . he was cutt almoste all in peeces.”
16
Such attitudes may explain why neither the Moriscos nor the Jews were invited back.
16
Such attitudes may explain why neither the Moriscos nor the Jews were invited back.
As late as 1728, a total of 106 Moriscos were prosecuted by the Inquisition in Granada, and another 119 were charged the following year. In 1787 the English traveler Joseph Townsend claimed that “Even to the present day both Mahometans and Jews are thought to be numerous in Spain, the former among the mountains, the latter in all great cities. Their principal disguise is more than common zeal in external conformity to all the precepts of the Church.”
17
Such claims seem unlikely, even if the Inquisition appears to have believed them. There is no doubt that many Moriscos survived the expulsion and managed to remain in Spain or return to it later, but it is difficult to believe that either Moriscos or Jews were able or willing to maintain such dissimulation for so long, even if certain vestiges of the past were still visible to the more keen-eyed foreign observers. In his erudite
Handbook for Travellers in Spain
(1845) Richard Ford visited Alpujarran towns whose inhabitants he described as “half-Moors, although they speak Spanish” and whose Spanish he believed was “strongly tinctured with Algarrabia.” Ford was particularly struck by the appearance of the peasants of rural Murcia who “with handkerchiefs on their heads like turbans and white kilts, look, from this contrast of linen with bronzed flesh, as dusky as Moors.”
18
17
Such claims seem unlikely, even if the Inquisition appears to have believed them. There is no doubt that many Moriscos survived the expulsion and managed to remain in Spain or return to it later, but it is difficult to believe that either Moriscos or Jews were able or willing to maintain such dissimulation for so long, even if certain vestiges of the past were still visible to the more keen-eyed foreign observers. In his erudite
Handbook for Travellers in Spain
(1845) Richard Ford visited Alpujarran towns whose inhabitants he described as “half-Moors, although they speak Spanish” and whose Spanish he believed was “strongly tinctured with Algarrabia.” Ford was particularly struck by the appearance of the peasants of rural Murcia who “with handkerchiefs on their heads like turbans and white kilts, look, from this contrast of linen with bronzed flesh, as dusky as Moors.”
18
It is tempting to believe that these Murcian “Moors” were descendants of the Christianized Moriscos expelled by Salazar in 1614, who had survived the expulsion or discreetly made their way back into the country, but this cannot be proven. Ultimately the stories of the Moriscos who survived belong to an invisible history that will probably never be told. But it is clear that Philip and Lerma never succeeded in eradicating “all memory of the things of the Moors” from Spain. The legacy of the Moorish past survived the great purge; it lived on in Spain’s architecture and landscape, its literature and cuisine, and the thousands of Spanish words borrowed from Arabic. Still, for more than two hundred years after the expulsion, Moorish Spain constituted a forgotten and largely shameful chapter in Spanish history, and the Moriscos themselves were barely remembered at all.
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